Chapter 1 – Desiring Elsewhere

Desiring Elsewhere explores the possibilities of utopian thinking through embodied practice, performance and queer imagination. This chapter approaches utopia not as a distant abstraction, but as a lived, felt, and performable horizon – offering strategies that help to navigate contemporary political pressures and oppressive climates. At its core, it examines how desire, movement and play can enact alternative realities, stretch temporal and spatial frameworks, and challenge fixed ontologies and epistemologies. Curated around the work of queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz and his seminal text Cruising Utopia, chapter 1 traces movement and thought through which desires for different bodies, affective possibilities and erotic modes of being are articulated. Desiring Elsewhere emphasises the plasticity of the body, the playfulness of performative action, and the radical potential of experimentation. Dreaming and playing emerge here as deliberate, embodied strategies – moments in which bodies stretch beyond normative constraints and enact speculative visions of possible worlds. In this chapter, utopia is both political and intimate: a vision of futures that are at once desired and performed, speculative yet materially experienced.